


from winter to summer to winter again

by iphigenias



Series: a greyjoy and a stark [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s08e03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 16:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18642160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphigenias/pseuds/iphigenias
Summary: She holds the feeling of Theon’s hand in her own like a prayer to the Seven; strong like the Warrior, warm like the Mother. She will never hold his hand again.





	from winter to summer to winter again

**Author's Note:**

> welp. that was. an episode.
> 
> this is a sequel to my previous theonsa fic but shouldn't be too hard to follow on its own. title from jenny of oldstones.

The sun splits open the horizon like a peach. Sansa has made her way up to the battlements and watches the way the light runs like golden blood across the snow. There is a stench of death in the air, at odds with the sight before her. Like a dagger, pressed into a back by a friend. Like a murder, in place of a wedding.

Sansa knows Theon is dead in the time it takes her to walk from the crypts to the wall. She does not know how she knows. There is a – feeling, perhaps. A sense of a shadow of a bruise on her heart, freshly purple and tender. She thinks of a kiss – stolen, in the godswood, between the hush of the leaves like a choir. She holds the feeling of Theon’s hand in her own like a prayer to the Seven; strong like the Warrior, warm like the Mother. She will never hold his hand again. She thinks she’ll never hold another’s.

The survivors meet in the wrecked ruin of the courtyard. Jon’s face is bloody, his hair matted. He takes one look at Sansa and crosses the bodies in one bound to crush her in an embrace. He smells worse than the battlefield; Sansa buries her face in his neck and breathes in deep because he smells alive, too.

It could be a year ago. Sansa and Jon, in a courtyard in Winterfell that had seen better days. Sansa knows Jon is thinking it too; when she pulls back to look at him, he is almost smiling.

She thinks of Ramsay, and the chewed-up bones they’d cleared from his cell. There aren’t enough dogs in Winterfell to eat the bodies piled up in her walls; they will have to burn.

Daenerys stands by the gate. Her beautiful clothes are ruined, and her hair is brown with dried blood. Her shadow, the Mormont exile, is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Lyanna.

“It’s over,” Jon says, looking over at Daenerys. Sansa wants to grab his chin and shake it; tug his hair and call him a child and scream at him for giving away everything Robb had fought for, everything Robb and Mother had died for. The feeling is not new but the white-hot rage behind it is; Sansa has to bite her tongue until she draws blood to stop herself from speaking.

“Not yet,” she says instead, looking at Daenerys as well, thinking of a golden queen in a bloody castle half a kingdom away and yet closer, closer than ever. Jon does not hear her; he is walking over to Daenerys, careful not to slip on the viscera spread over the cobblestones like straw.

“Where is Arya?” Sansa asks no one, and lifts her skirts to go find her sister herself.

The castle has become a graveyard. Winterfell’s walls hold so much bad inside them, and now it spills out for all to see. Sansa steps over body after body; gets her foot stuck in the open stomach of an Unsullied and falls to her knees in the muck and the filth. Her hand slices against a broken sword in the debris; she barely feels the sting.

By the time she reaches the godswood her gown is filthy to the waste with death. “Arya?” she calls, stumbling in the snow. “Bran?” The trail of bodies leads her to the heart tree; she hears her siblings before she sees them, the soft overlap of their voices cutting through the leaves like a fish through water. “Arya! Bran!”

“Sansa?” comes the reply, and she could weep from the feeling it of all.

She finds them crouched together – Bran in his chair, Arya hunched beside him – and falls to her knees to hug them both. Arya hugs her back, fiercely, and Sansa _does_ weep when she feels the soft pressure of Bran’s hand against her spine. She cries only briefly, and when she’s finished her eyes are burning from the tears.

“You look terrible,” Arya informs her as she sits back on her heels. Sansa laughs, and the sound surprises her. Arya takes one look at her face and collapses as well, shoulders heaving. Sansa does not know if anyone has ever laughed like this in the godswood before; somehow, it feels more sacred than prayer.

“What happened?” she finally asks, leaning against Bran’s legs and holding onto Arya’s knee with her uninjured hand. Arya wipes the tears from her eyes with her sleeve and shrugs.

“Does it matter?” she asks in reply. “It’s over.”

“Not yet,” Sansa says again, and Arya’s face hardens.

“Not yet,” she agrees.

Sansa rests for a moment, tilting her head to the sky to feel the sun press against her skin through the red leaves of the weirwood. When she can see spots through her closed eyelids, she looks back down again. Shifts her gaze to Bran, who is already looking at her.

“Where is Theon?” she asks, but already knows the answer.

Sansa stands. Makes no effort to brush the snow from her dress. Takes one step, then another, away from the heart tree to the pile of bodies ahead of her.

She sees his hair first.

The sun dances off a single, stray curl against his cheek. It looks almost as red as hers in the light. There is a sword thrust through his stomach, and the corner of his mouth is bloody. But his eyes are closed, and there is a restfulness to the way his limbs have fallen that makes it look as though he is asleep. As if, were Sansa to reach out a hand, she could shake him awake and brush the hair from his eyes and lean forward to steal a second kiss in the godswood that has held so many terrible secrets in its lifetime it could stand to hold a few happy ones as well.

Sansa kneels. She grasps the hilt of the sword in both hands and pulls it from Theon’s stomach, closing her ears to the sound it makes as it slides out and onto the bloody snow. She kicks it away; shifts her body so she’s sitting with her legs out to one side, and curls into Theon like the curve of his longbow. He’s cold, but Sansa can fool herself into thinking it’s just snow. She runs a finger along the shell of his ear.

“Of course I will have you,” she whispers into the space between them. “As long as I can. As long as I can, Theon Greyjoy.”

Sansa lies there in the snow for as long as she allows herself to. When she is done, she stands, and looks away from Theon’s body in the snow – far, far away from the salt and the sea.

“Let’s go home,” she says, pulling Arya to her feet with one hand and shifting Bran’s chair from its divot in the snow with the other.

The hush of the heart tree’s leaves follows them all the way out.

*

The ocean is hungry and swallows the body in one wave. Two women stand knee-deep in the surf, one with hair as red as young flame. The salt wind whips it around her head like a halo of fire; against the stormy grey of the sea, she looks a beacon. “He died for you,” the other woman says, but her voice is sad, not hateful.

“He died for himself,” Sansa corrects, and stands beside Yara on the shore just off Pyke, long after Theon is lost to the blue.


End file.
